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I paid for Kagi for a bit, but got a weird vibe when I realized they were working pretty hard to paper over the fact that they pay a third party to scrape Google search results for them. The public-facing side of that coin is Kagi's position that Google should make their index available to competitors (see https://blog.kagi.com/waiting-dawn-search).

All that's to say: when I paid for Kagi, I thought I was investing in additional search infrastructure, and didn't realize Kagi had no aspirations to build their own general purpose index, and instead primarily aggregate results from other indexes, either adversarily (Google, Bing) or not (Yandex, Mojeek, Brave, Apple, etc.) I understand they do maintain their own small-web index, but I thought their aspirations were higher when I first jumped on that train.

I've been a Kagi subscriber for several years now.

If you're questioning the AI features, know that I am only barely aware they exist. I have never, not even once, accidentally or otherwise, engaged the AI features without going out of my way to do so. I've never seen what their AI is like. I have no idea what it's for or why I'd want it.

It's beautiful. Kagi has AI I suppose, but it's over there and not in my face. I don't think I've ever seen an AI nag in the UI, but their UI itself is also over there and out of my way.

Thank you, Kagi, for staying politely the hell out of my way. I love you.

My wife and I have a family account. I absolutely love it and have used it for a while. I’m a programmer and use it more for that kind of thing. She, however, does the purchasing and shopping and product hunting for our house. She keeps trying to use it but ends up with Google tabs open anyway. As as much as I’m a big Kagi fan, YMMV depending on your usage patterns.

The Kagi stats graphs (showing membership growth) since May 20th when Google announced their replacment of Google Search speaks for itself: https://kagi.com/stats

Slow gradual growth before, large increase in the daily growth rate since.

It'll be interesting keeping an eye on how that growth rate goes over time. :)

The customizability of Kagi is what really makes it shine.

You can ban Pinterest links, boost Mozdev, ban listicles, boost whatever.

Kagi gets very good very fast as you customize it and it's easy to keep it updated as sites go up or down in quality.

The community shared boost and ban lists are a great resource too. Making it easy to see and copy what others find useful.

My annual Kagi subscription lapsed last week, so I decided to see how DuckDuckGo is doing these days.

The feature I missed most from Kagi was domain filtering, so I had Claude write a quick userscript for DDG that lets me boost, pin, and block specific domains. uBlock Origin aside, DDG even lets you turn off ads natively.

Kagi is good, but the redirection felt a bit flaky lately, and I was dealing with an annoying bug where my localization kept defaulting to Groningen for no apparent reason.

I’ll stick with this DIY setup for a bit, though I might well end up back on Kagi once I realize how good I had it.

Kagi is really nice. i love the built-in feature to hide certain pages from appearing from results, and also how AI their stuff really feels opt-in. there are a bunch of other small things like navigation with keyboard that i really like too.

Same here. It just stuck immediately and now I've been using it daily for over 4 years. Was on DDG before but prefixed almost everything with !g

I get a weird feeling when I see people googling things using Google (hehe), the amount of bs is mindboggling.

I'm a Kagi subscriber, too. But it is also partly a proxy for Google Search. My worry is the impact of Google Search quality degradation on Kagi. Mojeek doesn't cut it.

I end up doing a lot of searching with Mistral Le Chat (also a subscriber).

What I'd like to know is power cost difference between the two (on the server-side). Ie. is Mistral sustainable financially or are they also running on vc / burning money. Although France uses nuclear, so it is a drop in a bucket I suppose.

I have been a Kagi subscriber for years but I do increasingly find myself using Google. It's not good at local searches or news searches. It's also not good at showing quick context like Google's knowledge graph, especially with images. Finally it's considerably slower.

Kagi is better for research and knowledge work, Google is still better for quick lookups.

Another huge Kagi fan here. So far the only search engine that doesn't feel like I'm loosing compared to Google.

Once in a while someone recommends Kagi and I do go check it out. However, the index size is very small. It depends a lot on what you search but for most of my searches, it is not enough. I feel duckduckgo and bing together are a perfect replacement instead.

I subscribed to Kagi for a few months and really wanted to stick with it. For general web searches the results were exactly what I was looking for. It was the lack of local/location based search that kept sending me back to Google.

Needing to be authenticated too run a search feels very wrong, in soooo many ways.

I tinkered with it two or three years ago and didn’t really stick with it. I just made it my default on Firefox again and going to try for a few weeks. Appreciate the nudge

my prediction is that sooner or later kagi will be bought by google or microsoft

I mean, the root problem is, who searches anymore? Or better said, the ones who search are decreasing exponentially.

I only use Google to search for reddit posts.

The rest is ChatGPT or Claude.

Is Kagi compromised? I am a duckduckgo user but always have to use yandex for political things ducduckgo, google etc will push down artificially low in the results due to their 'partnerships' with certain 'international advocacy organizations'.

I've tried it, too. Loved it. Was nearly ready to pay for it. Then I learned that they source their data from Yandex. To hell with that! I'll rather get my search results on paper via carrier pigeon than support the rape of Ukraine.

Do not fund the Kremlin!

Does Kagi still use Yandex index behind the scenes? If this is true, then certain fraction of the payment goes to Russian Federation and financing its war and genocide in Ukraine. This is the reason I have to refrain from using this otherwise excellent service.

I like the idea of Kagi but their shady corporate issues and continued funding of Russia is just a no go.

This looks very promising. Thank you for investing time in this.

Assuming it indexes everything locally and falls back to traditional search engines if none found, how do you feel about adding a shared middle layer? A layer that simply indexes all the canonical data that doesn't have any personal info. This way, the contributors can automatically contribute the pages they index - building a shared search engine over time! The whole thing can work without a crawler of its own (under appropriate license so people can trust it)

This is great news!

Hister sounds like a idea I had years ago but gave up on after running into issues with index size taking up way too much storage.

Long ago I've used Searx and really liked it but after some point didn't see the point as opposed to using Google more directly. But lately in the back of my mind I've thinking about checking in on it again.

Have been using hister for a while now and have found it super useful! There are so many times I find myself trying to remember a website I looked at a couple months ago and can't find it again via a regular search. Hister has saved me there already multiple times.

The only feedback I have is the initial indexing from my large history was rough. There were a lot of domains that kept blocking me for exceeding rate limiting or wouldn't let me index at all. I could see it being useful to import a history file and organize it by domain inside some sort of temporary database to track/distribute attempts and get a more detailed report on complete domain failures.

Regardless though - great work!

I use my own domain index to navigate the web.

- If I wanted to use use my domain list to start hister, to download my preconfigured / like domains?

- Can I make some pages to rank higher in it?

- Can I assign tags to pages (by which I could later on filter?)

My domain index

- https://github.com/rumca-js/Internet-Places-Database

It's great seeing some more varied takes on search engines like this. That's essentially the same reason I use inoreaders rss search to find articles when I want to revisit them etc and it has been super handy. I know there have been some projects focused on rss search engines like OpenOrb that have some similarities to Hister. Makes me wonder if Hister could seed its history using rss.

Thank you for making Searx, I use it as the web search tool MCP for local models and it works very well, so that not only big companies have the power to show or hide results now.

I'm on a self-hosted seaxng. It's great. I just need a computer up 24h/7d.

A VPS with without a black listed IP is good. A simple rootless container, update is easy.

Configuration takes little time, not much.

I still hate that I have to double the bang to use the same bang as DDG.

Example: "!!wde Ente" to go to the German wikipedia page about duck instead of "!wde Ente" with DDG.

Happy hister user here. Thank you!

> It messes up sometimes

i have the opposite experience as i've found it to mess up a lot to the point that I can't trust the AI Overview answer at all. I've seen it be confidently wrong too many times and now the trust factor just isn't there.

I blocked AI overview because it starves websites of their own traffic and revenue.

Websites accepted Google scraping their content because it gave them a prominent blue link plus excerpt to drive traffic. Now everyone’s content is blended together and maybe, if they’re lucky, their site is chosen amongst the blend to get a tiny citation link.

I blocked it because I found it was in the sour spot of being good enough to be tempting to rely on, but bad enough to be risky to rely on.

When the search results are bad, usually I can at least tell that they're dubious: either they're from obviously unreputable sites, or they conflict with each other, or they just don't quite address my query. But an inaccurate AI overview can look very similar to an accurate one.

I also like their AI Overview (though just like all the other LLMs it confidently tells me wrong info all the time). Still I miss when Google was a good information retrieval system where you could give it a string of text and it would find just about anything I was trying to remember having seen somewhere before.

Enjoy it while you can. Google spent years perfecting the art of steering users away from what they searched for and toward advertiser sites, all while pretending to be a search engine. There's no way showing users the exact answer right beneath their search query is profitable in any meaningful sense. And so, it will end.

It no longer searches for me but tells me to search for what I’m looking for, which brings it back to itself, telling me to go search for what I’m looking for…

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

I don't believe this for a second. It has constantly the worst output of any serious AI I've seen, by far. It's laughably wrong sometimes, usually just wrong. It can usually cope with mundane keyword searches where it's still better to just read the wiki blurb, because even those can be mangled.

Same here , about 95% of my searches o just look at the AI overview, and that’s been enough.

I don’t like AI only idea but I think it will work just fine

The primary way that Google's AI Overview appears in my life is having to correct the misapprehensions of older family who see the immediate answer on top of their search and just uncritically accept it. Based on that, I think it must be wrong quite a lot.

> And between ads, cookie popups, newsletter popups, notification permission popups, websites with a high Time to First Byte, and all the useless filler around the content, websites are a nightmare to browse

Yes, but most of these things are results of adtech having so much impact on the web/how we publish/consume/get paid for the content we create. I'm a bit bitter/sad about this.

If the AI overview produces plausible sound answers, how do you know that it messes up very rarely?

If I search topics I am knowledge about, the overviews are almost always at least slightly wrong.

Not all websites are correct sources of information, but I am generally aware of which websites are trustworthy and can cross check.

This opinion would hold much more weight if it weren’t coming from an account created literal days ago in an age where LLM-enabled astroturfing is so obviously everywhere online and especially on this forum.

Additionally the same companies promoting the use of AI now have been significant cultural drivers in many of the things you claim are the reasons to choose an AI answer, so it would seem a healthy amount of skepticism towards solutions offered by the co-creators of the problem is warranted.

I do like it - however, I find my self using google less and less every day. I lean much more toward agents as my primary search tool for work related items.

For daily things - finding restaurants, looking up my kid's symptoms, etc. - I still use Google

You are not the only one.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely) but so do websites.

I disagree with “sometimes”. But anyway, the gargantuan difference is that with websites you can get a feel for their credibility. As a simple example, documentation on MDN is miles more trustworthy that your average SEO spam blog, and you can see this as soon as you enter the page. Yes, some scammers are craftier than other, but the signal is there.

With LLMs, all answers get the same weight.

And asking for sources is not reliable. They are too often made up or contradict what the page says.

> and I don’t even have to leave Google to get it.

And what will you do when most posts on the web are just junk SEO spam to trick LLMs into telling you what they want? It’s not like that’s hard to do, even.

https://www.anthropic.com/research/small-samples-poison

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260218-i-hacked-chatgpt...

I hate that it confidently claims something based on a single Reddit/forum comment. This happens very often and it’s often wrong.

As a user: I love it!

As a former blogger: I hate it. But I knew years ago where things were heading and stopped. No point in blogging/ writing etc.

Sometimes? It gives completely incorrect/hallucinated information more than 50% of the time, making it nearly useless.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

Have you actually used it? Because sometimes is doing heavy lifting there and very rarely is flat out lying. It consistently messes up and hallucinates.

Google themselves are the primary driving reason why most websites are unreadable.

And since now they explicitly aim to never drive any human traffic to any websites, it will only become worse.

> It messes up sometimes (very rarely)

Then you are extremely ignorant about the topics that you research, because I don't think I've seen a single AI overview that did not have a mistake, and I don't think I've seen less than half that got a critical fact wrong.

I hate it conceptually but in practice it often has what I need, and I can usually just scroll past it when I don’t

I like the AI Overview feature because it gets straight to the point and with no ads or cookie banners in the way, not because it’s AI.

This is the way the internet used to be before it was enshittified, you just type in some keywords and the first result was probably the most relevant and readable source of info. But now, no more.

I think if a modern search engine could deliver the same experience but with organic human written content, I’d probably use that. This is probably a new niche now for upcoming search engines, focused on finding human created works.

[dead]

I'm using chatbots for search, but that's only because Google became so horrible at it.

I'd rather just have results without chatbot fluff.

I do mostly use AI instead of Google these days. When I do use Google, it's because I want to use Google and not an AI. But Google increasingly shoves AI in my face.

I had to laugh as I read this, but it feels so appropriate to the current state.

I will say off topic that, speaking to an early googler, there is actually documentation of meetings where they discussed what "don't be evil" meant and decided actual business options they should and should not pursue. It was not just a motto or a "code of conduct", but meant as and used to justify consequential actions.

> https://

Pre-2010 Google search didn't use https by default, almost no one did besides specific cases, like processing payment. And even then, only the critical part was https, the rest, like images was plain http. So, for a true pre-2010 experience, you want http:// links.

Post-2010 Google played an important role in pushing for https. From boosting https search results, to Chrome being annoying to unencrypted connections, to sponsoring Let's Encrypt, to forcing HSTS on their TLDs.

I kind of miss http, it was a time when the web was a public thing, a place for sharing, not for keeping secrets. But to be fair that's just nostalgia, the modern (commercial) web that generalized encryption enabled is so useful and convenient that I can't imagine going back.

"Don't be evil" is still in the code of conduct, it's just the last line now. Journalism, as it usually does, perpetuated a misleading scary story in order to garner eyeballs/clicks.

> We live in the dystopia we deserve. We have built it with our own hands and it is here to stay.

That's a bit unfair. Not all of us who live in it had a hand in building it. In fact, very few of us had the leverage to fight against it.

Just FYI, at DuckDuckGo we have a search setting to turn ads off: https://duckduckgo.com/settings

We also have a no ai version: https://noai.duckduckgo.com/

Just this morning I was helplessly looking at r/ecosia for a way to get rid of the new AI tab they've added (there's no way). Signed up for Uruky, let's see how it fares.

Am I right in that I cannot demo a couple of searches without subscribing?

is it foss?

+1 I did the same a few years back. It’s fine most of the time. Their AI assist is ok as well. No complaints here, can always fallback to google if the results aren’t good enough

Also a long-time DDG user here, the lack of AI chat by default at the top of searches is great, if i wanted to use AI I wouldn't be opening a search engine.

Sad, because Google's homepage was once a paragon of bloat-free design. While their competitors enshittified, Google kept just giving good results fast without a lot of junk. They became the 90+% market share leader, and enshittified thereafter.

I find the results much worse though, especially in the last two or three months. My query is treated as a vague suggestion instead of a command, and the search index has become noticeably smaller.

There's uBlacklist extension for browsers that helps filtering out search results from "offensive" sites and it works with most popular engines - including Brave Search

https://ublacklist.github.io/docs

I'm using the 'Hacker News / 1k short' goggle all the time.

Brave is such a horrible brand. I don't think they'll succeed, but they're definitely trying to do MS-style EEE. Browser, search engine, and security (nefariously called "ad blockers" by the people that don't want users fully controlling traffic and code that reached and runs on their machines) should forever be separate entities.

Brave Search feels like '08 Google.

I don't expect the boot on the other foot to taste any better

I'm going to point this out as the hidden gem of the thread. I just gave etools.ch a test by feeding it a query I had repeated and refined on every other search engine many times over the past 20 years and never made headway, and it found it immediately.

So, now I have a nice video clip of "The Ballad of the S.S. Forgetful", which it turns out aired near the end of Sesame Street Episode 2130. :)

I'm using Ground News for skimming through the news, their ads are everywhere, but it is a somewhat good product. I pay for the most basic plan and it is pretty cheap. If I want a deeper dive in some story I look the links to the original posts their provide

Sometimes there is, actually, a vocal minority.

And at least I know that I am happy to talk about a product that I pay for. Is some of it because I feel like there's a sunk cost - the amount of money that I've paid into it? Yes, of course there is. Is it a good search engine? Yes.

Do I wish there were features added to it that they've promised for a while now? (namely being able to pay for more AI credits, especially if you paid a year in advance?) Yes.

It's a niche service that is almost perfectly tailored to meet the needs of HN users.

It's a paid-only service, without ads - "you are not the product", that lets you hide results from popular (to the mainstream) sites like Instagram and Pinterest, and to filter out low-quality sources like W3Schools, while raising MDN and the Arch Linux wiki to the top.

HN is cringe with their influencer marketing, always have been.

Kagi, Claude, Rust, and other Canadian trash nobody will ever use in the real world.

Over the past 10 years I've been using general search as little as ever. For 95% of my requests I know the website that will resolve my request. DuckDuckGo bangs are a great feature for landing on a specific website with your search: https://duckduckgo.com/bangs

I find that both fail to find matches on anything long tail, but with Google/Bing/DDG I quickly start getting results that don't follow my search criteria. Probably one of the more useful features I wish all engines did was to acknowledge when they simply don't have results.

I'd say about 1 in 5 searches for me is apparently "long tail" and I've never been more aware of how dead the internet is. I regularly still compare to DDG and Google, and spend about 300% more time on the others trying to find a match and discovering I have more results only because they made my quotes terms optional or ignored my time restrictions.

Interesting. Many times I find the opposite case, where my long tail search on Kagi will turn up SOME stuff that's kind of pertinent to the subject, and I'll swap to Google to see if the results are better there, only for it to barely have anything pertinent.

The main issue I've had with Kagi is that using "before:" and "after:" just seems weirder than it does on Google, and will throw in some stuff that's visibly outside the ranges I selected sometimes.

> my searches are almost entirely long-tail searches

any chance you have an example of such searches off the top of your head that you wouldn’t mind sharing?

Recently even searching for things like best xyz on Kagi has been nothing but ai sites in the results. Seems their stop slop project failed.

I still use and recommend Kagi but the results have gotten worse, but I also think that’s just an indicator of the health of the web as a whole.

This comment reads as, "It's been bad forever, but only a little, and look at all the good stuff that happened!"

Let me correct.

Search was good as late as 2010, when they changed the engine to facilitate an "instant search, search-as-you-type" feature. It was decent until around 2015, when a pivot to privileging "brands" poisoned the results. And it's been useless since the pivot to semantic search (in part to facilitate Home/Nest products) and a series of index purges over the past few years.

We had something very good, and we had it for a good while, and it was destroyed by a company that was a blackhole for investment and some of the brightest minds of my generation, sucking up untold amounts of labor and radiating little but "exceptionally deleterious to society" particles.

you did a lot of wind up for a "slightly worse" when half the first page is either AI or advertisement; they ditch pure keyword matching with "feels like you want this" matching which works for serving more ad to more eyeballs for longer. For bland searches, sure, its 'slightly worse' but for the ability to find verbatim results necessary to drill down into a subject it's absolutely worthless.

Been using DDG for about 8 years instead of Google search. Occasionally use google image search for matching an uploaded image. Use google maps for any local searches (credit to where credit is due its a superior map product).

What

(What do you search) they stink vs. Google even though Startpage is proxying them.

DDG is _not_ a “good” search engine — please, anybody have a hundred side-by-side screenshots to compare identical searches?

Edit - also admit Kagi’s great, I’m not affiliated; if you have money Kagi should be the pick (ideally purchased via their more private payment options probably)

AltaVista had so much noise that it was basically unusable... which exactly the issue Google solved and why it still exists and AV doesn't.

On one hand browsing web is completely impossible without adblocker. On the other hand the only sites that can survive without any ad revenue are product spam blogs that participate in "Amazon PartnerNet" and similar affiliate programs. Well, unless Google AI starts stripping referral link or replacing them with own one (Honey/Brave style). Do we even need search engine when there are just few hundreds of huge sites left?

Turn on reader mode.

I'm in this boat, currently subscribed and with the news of them potentially stripping out the AI offering from the $10 subscription tier, I might give DDG another shot.

It just doesn't seem to surface much reddit content. I know I know reddit, but on niche topics they often have some good discussions/links/experts.

It did for me, I can no longer find any GitHub project. Duck duck returns them on first try. Absolutely ridiculous, couldn't believe my eyes when I finally realized that. I get a ton of ads and product placements on first couple pages. What I search for is literally, word for word, name of the repository and it's not ambiguous.

Yes, significantly, but not recently. It can't search anymore. Like literally, it can't. You cannot reach a web page you know exists, like you used to.

Depends what you mean by 'recently', but for me they are much worse than they were several years ago. There was a period when people were complaining and I didn't really see why, but eventually whatever it was caught up with me too. I think it's a combination of losing the battle with SEO spam and prioritising things other than giving me what I actually ask for. There's lots of obvious junk (either 'AI slop' in the truest sense, or the human-written version that was common pre-AI) that finds its way to or near the top of the results; also, it can be difficult and frustrating to convince Google that I'm actually looking for X rather than the superficially similar and more popular Y, and that I would prefer a small number of actually-relevant results to a million irrelevant or sloppy ones.

Appreciate the advice! Took me a little bit to figure out how to do this, so I'll drop a useful guide: https://tedium.co/2024/05/17/google-web-search-make-default/

That feature (Search Assist) can be turned off in the settings, and we have a noai.duckduckgo.com domain that automatically turns it off along with other AI features. That said, Search Assist just summarizes web content and does not generate its own answers, but the summary is AI generated.

I'm using uBlock's AI Blacklist. It doesn't remove AI generated pages from search results but when a page doesn't load, you know.

I use Perplexity heavily as my general research clerk, and it's great at that, but I find trivial queries still make up a majority of my search activity. Waiting for an AI response to each of them would be an enormous time sink.

Do you gave an example query? I am curious.

I've had generally good experiences with Exa, I use it as an MCP in all my various coding tools and use the API whenever I build an AI thing that needs search.

Also an extremely happy Kagi user but can't speak to their API, haven't tried it yet.

I think the endgame is you go to Google or your favorite subscription based LLM for knowledge instead of visiting websites. Ads can continue living within LLM search results and it can even become a marketplace where you order within the LLM environment.

What websites?

I feel like this is a scene from a movie where a character goes "what are you talking about? Look around us, it's already gone" (idk why i am picturing Mark Whalberg for some reason).

But it's all just reddit, medium, twitter (twitter pages, w/e those blog things are).

The internet as we knew it is gone, man.

You can set Kagi as the default search engine today on iOS. Unless I’m misunderstanding.

At what ? Propaganda ? Can a llm find gwm-1.8d.tar.gz ?

This is because of the Google I/O (developer conference) announcements this week. They're about to overhaul their regular search and make it even more garbage, to the point - so it sounds - of it being more just a Gemini chatbot interface and less an actual search engine, ergo: not Google anymore.

Anyone here who uses kagi in a language other than English? Specifically German? Is it any good?

What's your monthly usage, aprox.? Do you use Kagi for getting to pages you know of but doesn't want to type the whole URL for, eg. typing "Hacker news" in the URL bar instead of "news.ycombinator.com"?

As someone who also loves Kagi, what do you like so much about Fastmail? Seeing it compared to Kagi makes me want to give it a try as well haha.

Kagi is good, but only for English language queries

Seems to require an account... no thanks

Honestly, same. I don't even think about it, I just and only use kagi.

Open Alex is a good Google Scholar alternative.

It’s unambiguously worse, in part because they backed away from spam filtering after merging with Double Click when the SEO parasites started buying tons of AdWords. There were multiple years where they’d rank the sites which scraped Stack Overflow, GitHub, Wikipedia, etc. higher than the sources, which is not a problem on Kagi in general but also one Kagi doesn’t refuse to give you tools to solve: a Kagi user can block low-quality domains and never see them again. Google not only doesn’t offer the option but if you ever click on a spam site they’ll treat that as a sign that you want more.

What's your method of blocking promoted results, recommended products, etc?

Digging through the crap in a Google search is like finding a recipe in a blog. Sure, it's there, but the experience isn't great. I'd rather pay for a better experience, like buying a cookbook or subscribing to nytc. If you can afford it, why wouldn't you?

People think Google removing "Don't be evil" means Google somewhat implicitly told everyone they'll be evil from now on. That doesn't make much sense. It was likely a marketing decision since having "evil" in your motto is not good even if you explicitly state "DON'T BE" before it. Just like if I write in my profile text "I'm not a pedo", you'll think "this guy is likely a pedo"

Yes that works but for how long? Facebook main feed could also be tweaked with url parameter that would force display posts in chronological order. But on one day that was "fixed".

I have seen this posted many times but can anyone elaborate?

On MacOS Safari you can set your homepage / new tab page to whatever search engine you like. It's almost as convenient. On iOS it's worse.

`&udm=14` just sends you to the "web" tab of search, which does remove the AI summary, but you also lose the widgets that google puts at the top of search, if you like those (weather, calculator, games, etc). one of my friends recently found that you can add a short invalid filter parameter like `&tbs=1` and it'll give you the main search with no AI but with those widgets if they would normally appear. you do still get the "People also ask" section, but that's probably easily removed with an extension or user script

The issue is that people produce content because they want visitors to their sites. If ChatGPT and Google just vacuum up content for AI summaries, people may stop producing that content. It really is, in the long-term, an existential issue for the web if search providers push people away from visiting websites.

Google's explicit plan is to never let users go to the websites. They scrape the website and have their AI summarize it.

If nobody goes to the websites, those websites no longer get traffic or revinue. In very short order there will be no more websites from which to scrape, and the AI will no longer have new data to summarize.

Where do you think this ends?

> I don't get the hysteria against LLM here? Like LLM's are the best thing to happen for search engines.

By eating the source of their results, pretty soon there wont be any sources that aren't crap.

You’re getting downvoted because you couldn’t even make it through one sentence without dismissing valid concerns. You simply assert that the results are better without showing awareness of the argument, which reveals your accusation of ideological bias to be rather blatant projection when you’re not even demonstrating awareness of the problems, much less the expertise needed to dismiss them. The accuracy issues are real and significant–you should especially learn about the research showing the problem when something wrong or incomplete is presented authoritatively by a trusted source like Google rather than some random blogger–but that’s not the only problem: Google is effectively parasitizing the open web which made them rich by no longer sending visitors to the sites which provide original content. That might be profitable for them but it’s worse for everyone else — even as a Google shareholder I think this shouldn’t be allowed.